01 Aug

Sales, Payment and Shipping

Your sales, payment and shipping system is a big deal to your customers. You need to invest in a safe, secure, but easy to use system! A good shopping cart will head off the abandonment of the shopping process by frustrated customers.
Your Shopping Cart application, should be simple for visitors to use – they need to be able to shop for multiple items on your site, take stuff out and put it back in, all the while getting accurate totals including shipping and tax charges so they don’t abandon the cart at checkout.

Your Checkout should be encrypted so any credit card or debit card payments you take are secure. You can also arrange to send customers to Paypal’s secure site to process transactions. Display your security certificate on the home page and various reassurances at your checkout page to reassure consumers that their personal information is secure.

Your FAQ needs to be very easy to get to without leaving the checkout queue. If customers have a question near the end of the checkout process, such as concerns about shipping, return policies, guarantees and other information, they should be able to get it from a small pop up, not have to navigate away. Having this information available adds another level of reassurance for your customers.

Send Confirmation Emails. Your customer will appreciate the concern you take to make sure they have a record for their transactions You should also offer a printable receipt at the end of the payment process. This can serve as a proof of purchase.

Ship out orders ASAP and insure them don’t get bad reviews for slow or careless shipping. Consumers read them and this is a pet peeve. If you ship promptly and the customer is happy, they will come back for moer and tell their friends!